You open a story app, type a few things, and something exciting happens. A character appears. A mystery is set up. And then - nothing. You play for another twenty minutes and realise the story isn't building toward anything. It's just... continuing. You probably forget why you even opened the app in the first place.

This is the most common complaint about AI-driven story games right now, and it's a fair one. The technology is genuinely impressive. The experience, too often, isn't.

So here's a plain rundown of what's actually out there, what each option does well, and where each one tends to fall short. No hype.

What does 'a real story' actually mean?

Worth being clear about this before the list, because it matters for the comparison. A real story has shape: a beginning that sets something up, a middle that complicates it, and an ending that pays it off. That's it. Doesn't have to be Shakespeare. But it does have to go somewhere.

The problem with most AI story tools is that they're designed for generation, not for narrative. They produce the next sentence well. They don't know where the story is going - so it doesn't go anywhere. (If you want to dig into why this is so hard to pull off, our post on why we describe stories as 'going somewhere' gets into the weeds on it.)

The main options compared

AI Dungeon is the one most people try first. It's been around for a while, it's accessible, and there's a free tier. It'll play along with almost anything you type - which sounds great until you realise that a narrator who always says yes has nothing to say. Stories drift. Characters forget who they are. Something you destroyed will quietly reappear. Mind you, if you want a pure freeform sandbox where you're essentially the author using AI as a writing tool, it does that reasonably well. It's just not trying to tell you a story - it's helping you tell yourself one.

NovelAI is aimed more squarely at writers and worldbuilders than at players. It's very good at its actual job: helping you generate prose in a particular style, with fine-grained controls. But there's no narrative structure underneath it. No chapters, no plot engine, no ending. If you want a creative writing assistant, it's worth a look. If you want to play a story, it's the wrong tool.

Kindred and similar character-focused apps lean into relationships and social roleplay rather than plot. If that's what you're after - building a connection with a specific character, having ongoing conversations - they do that. They're not really story games, though. No quest, no stakes, no finale.

Wordfarer is what we're building at Jolly Good Apps, so take that as you will - but we'll be straight about what it does and doesn't do. It's a text adventure for Android and iOS (still in development, not out yet) built around what we're calling 'tales': each one has a proper structure, named chapters, a plot that builds through them, and a genuine ending. Not an endless sandbox. A story with a shape.

Characters remember you and how you've treated them. If you break something, it stays broken. If you make an enemy, they're an enemy. The tale sizes itself - some are shorter, some longer - rather than padding indefinitely. And your character keeps a pocket notebook, written in their own voice, covering only what they actually know. It's a small thing, but it makes the world feel solid.

Say you start a tale in a fog-bound port city, playing a disgraced cartographer trying to clear their name. You do something early on - burn a letter, trust the wrong informant - and that decision echoes forward. That's what we're aiming for. Characters who actually remember you turn out to be surprisingly hard to get right, and it's most of what we've been working on.

What Wordfarer doesn't do: it's not out yet, so you can't play it today. There's no web version either - wordfarer.app is just the product site. And it won't let you do absolutely anything in a pure sandbox sense; the story has a shape, which means it isn't infinitely malleable. That's a feature for some people and a dealbreaker for others.

Who should pick what

  • You want a freeform writing sandbox with no constraints: AI Dungeon, with low expectations for consistency.
  • You want a creative writing assistant: NovelAI is the stronger tool here.
  • You want ongoing character relationships more than plot: The character-companion apps (Kindred and similar) are built for that.
  • You want a story with chapters, stakes, consequences, and a real ending: Wordfarer is what we're building for exactly that, and it's on its way.

The honest version

Most AI story tools right now are impressive technology wearing a story's clothes. The generation is good; the narrative architecture isn't there. That's not a criticism of the teams building them - it's just a genuinely hard problem that most of them aren't trying to solve.

If you've bounced off the category because every story you started petered out into nothing, that's not you being hard to please. That's a real gap in how most of these tools are designed. A story that wanders forever without payoff isn't a story - it's homework.

We think there's something better possible. That's why we're building Wordfarer.